Female Icons Research Articles

Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón by Jean Graham-Jones

Reviewed by: Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón by Jean Graham-Jones Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón. By Jean Graham-Jones. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014; pp. 282. Jean Graham-Jones explores the many performative incarnations of Evita in a fascinating study that [End Page 486] invites broader consideration of how national icons manifest deeply rooted cultural anxieties. While most interpretations of Eva Perón as a transnational icon “alternate between sensationalized images of sanctified martyr and sensationalized images of demonized fraud” (3), the scholar complicates the pop and political appeal of this historical figure as she teases out the intersections of Evita the icon, the many celebrity performers who have impersonated or played her, factual and fictional narratives about the country’s First Lady, and Argentine politics. Graham-Jones defines femicon “as referencing both female and feminist iconicity as well as participating in the larger cultural collective imaginary suggested in the other popular usages of the term” (8). The volume is organized in four chapters that frame the rise of Evita in the longer lineage of Argentine femicons and analyze the many performances—in theatre, music, film, radio, the internet, and the visual arts—that have recreated the historical character. Maybe most importantly, the arc of this study allows the reader to follow the “logic of the iconographic process” (10). Graham-Jones draws from Michel Foucault throughout the volume, and credits “Marvin Carlson’s ghosting and Jacques Derrida’s hantise, as well as Roach’s embodied and replaced ‘surrogate’” as having paved “the way for a critical engagement with our contemporary concept of icons and/in performance” (5). Graham-Jones’s first step toward contextualizing the rise of Evita into Argentina’s most powerful femicon includes the detailing of a large number of artistic works inspired by Camila O’Gorman, a nineteenth-century young woman executed by the government for running away with her priest-lover Uladislao Gutiérrez. The examination of this ensemble of works in the first chapter parallels O’Gorman’s biographical trajectory with later government-imposed violence in Argentina, and grants clarity to the intimate relationship between femicons and a given nation’s cultural history. The information in this chapter is especially helpful to readers less familiar with Latin American studies. To explain that “historical research is not the same as historical writing” (27), Graham-Jones introduces the relationship between fact and fiction in a number of plays performed in distinct time periods (Uruguayan Heraclio Fajardo in 1862; L. Mendoza Ortiz’s early twentieth-century historical drama; and the 1959 dramatic text by Miguel Alfredo Olivera; among others) and films (from Mario Gallo’s 1909 silent movie to Juan Batle Plana’s cinematic version in 1971). Her analysis moves to juxtapose Enrique Molina’s 1973 “surrealist historical” novel (34) and Griselda Gambaro’s 1982 La Malasangre in which the playwright makes use of metaphors to comment on the country’s political context of the 1980s. Graham-Jones deepens her theoretical discussion about the imprecision of historical accounts by offering an in-depth comparative reading of Maria Luisa Bemberg’s film Camila and Ricardo Monti’s plays Una passion sudamericana and Finlandia. The richness of this collection of works spanning genre and periods shows how the retelling of O’Gorman’s short life speaks of Argentina’s sociopolitical traumas. The variation in the accounts of her tragedy also primes readers to the many versions of Evita’s life. “The (Many, Many) Lives of Eva Perón” exposes the fluctuations in narratives about Perón and their relationship to the construction of Argentina’s national identity in the twentieth century. Departing from a comparative analysis of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1978 musical Evita and the 1986 Argentine rock-opera Eva, coauthored by playwright-historian Pedro Orgambide and actress Nacha Guevarra, who starred in the production, Graham-Jones poses that “[w]hereas Evita follows the standard ‘foreign’ negative party line regarding both the Peróns and Peronismo to deliver a rather predictable story of a woman driven to extremes by her apparently insatiable need...

Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón by Jean Graham-Jones

Evita, Inevitably: Performing Argentina’s Female Icons Before and After Eva Perón by Jean Graham-Jones

Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley

Reviewed by: Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan by Jan Bardsley Ulrike Wöhr Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan. By Jan Bardsley. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 224 pages. Hardcover £58.50/$112.00; softcover £24.99/$39.95. This well-written and timely book comes at a moment in history when U.S.-Japan relations, Japan’s postwar democracy, and Japan’s role in the world are at a new stage of social and political contestation, within and beyond Japan. Jan Bardsley provides a fascinating view of cultural politics of the 1950s that shaped the value system and the social order of postwar Japan as well as powerful discourses of national identity. Her analyses of representations of women and, in particular, the postwar ideal of the Japanese housewife, highlight the centrality of gender in these discursive processes. Bardsley focuses on the 1950s as a juncture “when [gender roles] could take several paths, but became naturalized in the housewife-salaryman model” (p. 5). She approaches the housewife (shufu) as a postwar icon of Japanese modernity connoting democratic progress and economic recovery, on the one hand, and modern domesticity, on the other. The housewife is, thus, comparable to earlier and similarly controversial constructs of femininity, such as the girl student (jogakusei), the new woman (atarashii onna), and the modern girl (modan gāru, or moga). In other words, the postwar housewife was, in her time, the latest in a series of female icons at the center of twentieth-century discourses of Japaneseness. The book, as its title suggests, understands 1950s representations of the housewife to be inseparably intertwined with discourses and power structures pertaining to the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War economic and cultural politics continued to hold up the ideal of the modern, emancipated, and sexually attractive American housewife even after the end of Japan’s Allied Occupation (1952), and while Japanese women were exhorted to emulate this model, Japanese men were denounced as a hindrance to women’s emancipation. The author traces the processes and products of such transnational gender politics in a range of sources—texts of various genres from women’s magazines, newspaper reportage, and visual images including photographs and cartoons. Her textual analysis “recreat[es] the theater” of five major disputes, or issues, she singles out from these sources and reconstructs the images and meanings that were attached to the housewife in these [End Page 247] controversies (p. 5). While Bardsley thus treats the housewife in the abstract, as a discursive phenomenon, her narrative also features flesh-and-blood housewives—most of whom identify themselves as such. These women inhabit the “contact zone” (discussed below) of 1950s Japan and participate in negotiations of “competing domesticities” (p. 2) as actors and/or objects in the debate. The introduction (chapter 1) begins with a short look at a 1959 Time magazine feature article on the emancipation of Japanese women, thus highlighting the transnational character of the book’s research subject and approach. As told in the magazine, this process of emancipation—which culminated in the wedding of Crown Princess (and now Empress) Michiko, the first commoner to marry into the royal family—owed its success to the American-led Occupation of Japan. Bardsley then takes up the social and political reality of housewives both in Japan and the United States and introduces the reader to the Cold War rhetoric of American domesticity as well as to a view of early postwar Japan through the lens of Marie Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” (p. 11). The final part of the introduction argues for the current relevance of Bardsley’s research by pointing out the persistence of competing narratives that evolved or gained prominence in the late 1950s. Among these are the notion of Japanese women being in need of foreign rescue from oppressive Japanese men; the idea of the Japanese housewife as a symbol and guarantor of public order and national identity by virtue of her very domesticity; and, not least, images of royal women and beauty queens as personifications of these contradictory concepts of femininity. Following the introduction, chapters 2 through 6 provide in-depth analyses of single issues that each...

Appropriating Jerusalem through Sacred Places: Disputed Land and Female Rituals at the Tombs of Mary and Rachel

Due to deep-seated political tensions and intermittent violence between various streams of the city’s three major religions, Jerusalem’s sacred landscape is in the midst of significant change. One of the most salient expressions of this phenomenon is the renaissance of female saint shrines, most notably the Tomb of Mary and the proximate Tomb of Rachel the Matriarch. At these sites, female symbols, imagery rituals, and materiality have become powerful tools for asserting political claims that pertain to land and belonging. I will take stock of this phenomenon through the lens of different ethno-religious groups in Israel/Palestine that are availing themselves of female symbols (such as fertility, suffering, and maternal care) to advance various objectives. I find that these symbols have charged valences within minority communities. For members of the country’s hegemonic denominations, Rachel is the Jewish people’s “eternal mother” as well as a national symbol of the “return of the exiles” to their homeland. At the same time, local Catholic and Orthodox Christians view Mary to be “the mother of minorities” who suffered on behalf of and continues to provide succor for the weak. As a minority, Christians in Israel/Palestine employ this image of the Virgin as part of their effort to struggle with their weakening grip over the territories. Viewing the Virgin as a protector of minority groups is a departure from the vast majority of the Christian world, where Mary constitutes a national symbol that reinforces social belonging. In sum, I show how, amid the ongoing religious struggle, both female icons and their respective sacred venues are mobilized by different groups for the sake of challenging the political order and reshaping the landscape.

Re-charting the Black Atlantic: Jackie Kay’s Cartographies of the Self

The aim of this article is to assess Jackie Kay’s poetry in its local and internationalist dimension, focusing on her contribution to incorporating Scotland into the transnational contemporary literary corpus that addresses and interrogates the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993) from various angles: political, cultural, and emotional. It analyses Kay’s development as a poet from her early publications in the 1980s to her recent pieces. Firstly, it contextualises Kay’s early career in the framework of 1980s Black British feminism and examines her depiction of hyphenated identities in Scotland. Secondly, it studies her multi-layered—biological, multicultural—interrogation and redefinition of genealogy in the collection The Adoption Papers (1991), as the starting point for the development of a more complex articulation of identity in subsequent pieces, like Other Lovers (1993) and Off Colour (1998). These two books are regarded as crucial in Kay’s progressive incorporation of her Scottishness into the personalised Black Atlantic she charts in her writing, where the appropriation of biographical elements from transcultural female icons serves as a strategy to emphasise the fluidity of relational selves. Finally, special attention is paid to The Lamplighter (2008) and its interrogation of Gilroy’s model through the parameters of gender and Scottishness.

Evita, inevitably: performing Argentina's female icons before and after Eva Peron

Evita, inevitably: performing Argentina's female icons before and after Eva Peron

Historical Personalities: Tweeting Standard Narratives in the History of Science - Social Media Trends in Medical History

Historical Personalities: Tweeting Standard Narratives in the History of Science - <b>Social Media Trends in Medical History</b>

The Philippines. Women's movements and the Filipina, 1986–2008 By Mina Roces Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012. Pp. 277. Bibliography, Index.

Women's movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008 By MINA ROCES Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012. Pp. 211. Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000472 Mina Roces's book Women's movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008 could be seen as a culmination of her work in the fields of Women's, Gender and Philippine studies. One of the foremost scholars of women and feminism in Asia, and particularly the Philippines, Roces's latest study of women's movements in the Philippines revisits the themes that have been central to her earlier work--Filipina women's history, Filipino and transnational feminisms, personal politics, fashion, and defining the 'Filipina' in theory and history--focusing on the 'history of the feminist project and its interrogation of the Filipino woman' (pp. 1-2). By exploring women's and feminist groups in the Philippines (mostly based in Manila), such as feminist nuns, indigenous women activists, women workers (including prostitutes and overseas contract workers), cultural workers in the media, actors, and teachers, Roces produces an engaging, compelling and well-researched study of feminism in the Philippines. According to Roces, most of these women's organisations are concerned with two major issues: challenging the dominant ideology of womanhood in the Philippines, and fashioning an alternative vision of Filipino women. To these ends, feminist leaders and activists deploy several discourses that centre on what Roces cahs a 'double narrative' of victimisation and oppression, while also forging an activist programme that produces role models and feminist practices designed to fashion an empowered Filipina. Most of the chapters are devoted to in-depth studies of various women's and feminist movements in the Philippines. She argues that these organisations advanced a particular form of Filipino feminism, which distanced itself from Western feminism and was grounded in a deep understanding of women's situation in the Philippines. Starting from the 1980s, these women's movements laid the foundation for a Filipino feminist theory that challenged the traditional representations of femininity in the Philippines such as the Virgin Mary or Maria Clara (the female protagonist in Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere), and instead promoted powerful female icons and heroines such as the babaylan (pre-Hispanic female shamans), Gabriela Silang (a revolutionary heroine who fought against the Spanish), and Lorena Barrios (a leader of the New People's Army who was killed in combat in the 1970s) as representatives of the ideal Filipina. Roces divides her work into three parts: 'Representing the Filipino woman'; 'Fashioning the Filipina through practices'; and 'Understanding the transnational context of the Filipina struggle'. Roces recognises the feminist nun, the prostitute and the woman worker as representatives of the new 'Filipino woman'. Although they did not totally reject the Catholic Church, feminist nuns played a key role in the evolution of Filipino feminism by deconstructing the religious roots of women's oppression. As single, unattached and successful women, they became alternative and subversive role models who 'sought to empower women by demystifying suffering, and resocialising women into rejecting the Catholic ideals that endorsed subservience to men' (p. 37). While nuns were represented as powerful women in the discourse of Filipino feminism, feminists represented prostitutes not as sex workers but as victims 'pushed towards a life of prostitution' by poverty, failures in government policy, and 'by social norms that idealised the woman as martyr and dutiful daughter' (p. 57). According to Roces, this discursive strategy was adopted by feminists in order to decriminalise prostitution and to punish male pimps, traffickers and clients, rather than prostitutes themselves. Finally, feminists have added 'workers' to 'wives and mothers' in their constructions of the 'feminine', representing peasant women, domestic and migrant workers as both victims of a male dominated local and global workforce, and as the chief breadwinners. …

Fräulein Setsuko Hara: constructing an international film star in nationalist contexts

Hara Setsuko is today seen as one of the great female icons of the ‘Golden Age’ of Japanese cinema. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the early formation of her star persona in the mid-1930s, historically a pivotal time for Japan and hence for Hara, due to the close connection between the nation's social history and its stars. At a time of profound change of the national self-image, Hara was catapulted into stardom by a film closely, but not exclusively, related to politics. This star-constructing took place in, and utilized, an international environment, aiming at making Hara Japan's ‘first international film star’ at a time of increasingly fierce nationalism. This article traces the transnational origin of Hara's career, arguing that the subsequent ability of her star image to signify ‘Japaneseness’ in all its variations (militarism, post-war democracy, nostalgia for times past) without losing its authenticity in the face of apparent contradictions is based in this event. Hara's star image mirrors the question of what Japan is or should be, because it was constructed out of this very discourse of international aspirations, national desires and a transnational context.

Diva Worship and the Sonic Search for Queer Utopia

Pragmatic and assimilationist ideals permeate contemporary gay culture: Michael Joseph Gross in The Atlantic, for instance, argues that gay male participation in music culture still fetishizes normativity. According to Gross, the current generation of gay men is indifferent to the veneration of female icons, an important aspect of gay male identity of the past. In this article I challenge these assertions. Using ethnographic research with fans of Lady Gaga, the article shows that for many gay men the continuing veneration of female icons remains an integral aspect of gay identity. I explore gay male music fandom of the past and of the present to imagine a potential queer future.

The “New Woman” and the Topography of Modernity in Colonial Korea

This article intends to illustrate gender roles as related to modernity in colonial Korea by focusing on the birth of the “New Woman” and its historical location. The New Woman appeared as a new female icon all over the world in the early twentieth century and implanted a new female identity produced by the introduction of modern, Western ideas in Korea. However, the embodiment of the New Woman in Korea shows historical variation from the prototype of a more global New Woman. Furthermore, in colonial Korea New Women did not present a singular, fixed collective identity but included diverse layers of female subjectivities. Specifically, with the flow of time, the representation of New Women shows the process of refraction and implosion of “New Woman” images, each having different connotations. This article traces the discursive transformation of the “New Woman” in mass media (mainly newspapers and magazines) from the 1900s to the 1940s, and its significant associations with the relationship of gender and modernity in colonial Korea. It also elucidates what it meant to be a New Woman historically in Korea.

Kamakha

Aparna Sharma’s Kamakha: Through Prayerful Eyes is a lyrical documentary which explores the dilemma of representing the unrepresentable figure of the Goddess Kamakhya enshrined in an ancient fertility worship site in Northern Assam. The Temple of Kamakhya is unique in offering no image of the devi or goddess. Instead her yoni or female organs are said to be contained in a sacred rock which is also the source of a natural spring. The rock, which is covered by a red cloth, is not allowed to be photographed or filmed, but devotees are instead invited to touch it. Intrigued by this haptic form of devotion and the very invisibility of this female icon in the context of theories of woman as image / “to-be-looked-at-ness”, Aparna’s film skirts around the temple, observing worshippers’ interaction with the space and interviewing local craftsmen and artists about their interpretation of the site.

Gendering Buddhism: The Miaoshan Legend Reconsidered

has traditionally utilized androcentric and Eurocentric approaches to its analysis of Buddhism. As a result, normative Buddhism has been configured as primarily monastic and male and focused on texts, while women's Buddhism is relegated to studies. In the following pages, Wing examines how these assumptions are at play in the interpretation of the well-studied, popular, canonical myth of Miaoshan. She further explores the gender biases inherent in that attempt to correct androcentrism in studies. By forming a theoretical matrix composed of feminist and colonial social critiques, the author hopes to reconfigure the ways in which Chinese women's narratives and women's narratives are understood. She broadens the discussion of what is understood to be Buddhist and what is constructed as special studies within Buddhism, as well as expands the larger discourses on gender in on China. By using previous scholarship as a point of departure, Wing reexamines the analytical taxonomies used in Chinese religion, Chinese Buddhism, and women in China. She scrutinizes these analytical models by exploring their epistemological foundations, revealing how discourses on Chinese (Buddhist) women and female icons like Miaoshan have been shaped. Wing first investigates the dominant views on women in historical records and biographies, which were responding to the changing roles of women in the Song dynasty. She then shows how these themes are reflected or critiqued in the Miaoshan legend and reinterprets the themes' meanings.

A DIÁSPORA DE MARIA. RELAÇÕES SINCRÉTICAS E CULTURAIS ENTRE NOSSA SENHORA, KIANDA E NZUZU EM O OUTRO PÉ DA SEREIA, DE MIA COUTO

Mary of Galille would become the biggest female icon of Christianity. However, centuries later, her image crosses the seas, inside the Portuguese caravels as the ‘patron saint of colonization’. Mary becomes diasporic and with other deities creates a syncretic relation with them – the same register of the relation with the sacred. From the Portuguese colonization in Africa, the colonizers using religious authority to impose the Christian faith to the Bantu people generated a hybrid and syncretic belief. In the novel O outro pe da sereia (2006), Mia Couto shows how this syncretism united the Portuguese Africa since colonization times to present days, and how Our Lady, the great Christian Mother also underwent this process, becoming in the novel the goddess of African waters. The aim of the article is to analyze this syncretism between the Virgin Mary, Kianda, the Bantu mermaid and Nzuzu, the Mozambican goddess of rivers. The analysis will focus on how the syncretism subverts the relationship between colonizers and colonized, while rescues identities and deep values of (post)-colonial people

Bluestockings: women of reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism

Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1779) Living Muses: the female icon The Bluestocking Salon: Patronage, Correspondence and Conversation 'Female champions': Women Critics of Shakespeare The Bluestocking Legacy in the Romantic Era Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Female Icons of the Zionist Movement: The Making of a National Heroine in Israel

The role of women in the Zionist heroic narrative has long been an issue of debate between those viewing them as equal partners in an emerging socialist state v.s others who equate them primarily with the task of national reproduction on the biological and cultural levels. This article claims that the ultimate template of a Zionist heroine must only include elements which are suitable for mythologizing and consequently for national reproductions. As women are conduits for national reproduction, the female heroic images that construct the basis for their national identity must be nationally and morally above all reproach. In order to investigate this claim the article analyzes the stories of four Zionist heroines, one sectoral, another local, a third grassroots and a fourth national, all of whom became part of the Zionist pantheon during different periods. By analyzing how their gendered images were presented to the public through the agents of national memory, and the amount of re‐writing that their personal histories necessitated, I will expand upon the gendered components of their heroic myths as presented in these frameworks, and the various implications of this gendering in view of their role of reproducers of the Zionist identity.

Rosie the riveter: A training perspective

AbstractExplored here are the training considerations for Rosie the Riveter, the fictional female icon created by the U.S. government as propaganda to draw women to working for the war industries. An observation is that “ordinary” training processes can be tethered to what we in the present day would now consider extraordinary contexts. Specifically, whether sexist ephemera or fervid fundamentalist movements training has borne witness to or aided and abetted human events both in triumph and in ignominy.

Cross-Gendering the Racial Memory

When Ernest Gaines chooses a woman as the individual subject for collective memorialization and the ideal medium of racial memory in his 1971 novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he participates in a significant but overlooked genre of black masculine discourse, the composition of black authorship as historical/national authority through the voice and viewpoint of a female protagonist. This cross-gendering of the racial imaginary, introjecting a male vision of racial collectivity and history through a female’s frame of reference, though not exactly a form of cross-dressing, can be usefully analyzed as such. Erecting a feminine monument to emblematize and materialize highly abstract notions like nationhood, justice, peace, warfare, virtue, democracy, pro/creativity, and truth has a long history in many cultures across the globe. It is a long-standing practice within many patriarchal cultures, in other words, to project highly abstract masculine visions of established power onto a female form, draped in feminine attire. Whether this occurs metaphorically, as in the case of gendering the nation-state as feminine (Britannia for the United Kingdom, Columbia for the United States, St. Joan for France, etc.), or through more literal iconography, such as the Statue of Liberty, the feminine form serves to purify, emblematize, and collectivize—and thus to transcendentalize—concepts of rightful dis/empowerment that are otherwise fraught with cultural-historical strife. The static nature of such imagery distances us from the contentiousness of the act of cross-gendering that occurs ideologically in the enunciation or re-erection of patriarchal power through an objectified, if celebrated, feminine icon. We can find evidence of this conventionally patriarchal kind of feminine iconography in black cultural practice. For instance, in black nationalist discourse of the 1960s and ’70s (whether in the Black Power movement in the United States or the post-colonial movements in the West Indies and Africa), there is a tendency to emblematize the rising black nation as a fecund black mother, frequently figured more transcendently as “Mother Africa” herself, even as the battle for and leadership of these emerging nations is assumed to be the purview of militant big men. Ironically, to index the greatness of the emerging nation, and the bigness of the male freedom fighters and founders, both figuratively and materially the female icon must be giganticized, making her a presence so massive as to become a queer she-male—masculine in size and intent, feminine in spirit and form. In European-American iconography, there is a drive to materialize this gigantic feminine figure not only by super-sizing her but also by casting her in the hardest stones—again the Statue of Liberty providing a perfect instance. Lacking the economic resources for such a luxury of patriarchal imagination, black nationalist practice most frequently resorts to more figurative embodiments of the gigantic feminine in art, poetry, song, and dance. Gaines’s gigantic female who voices and embodies black American epochal and epical history, Miss Jane Pittman, is cast as novel and film (1974) at the height of the black nationalist moment, when metaphorical she/males emblematizing the masculine heroism of black nation-building are proliferating all over the place in black popular culture. This paper analyzes Miss Jane Pittman in this historical context of the black nationalist gigantic female icon. I argue that while Gaines draws on this black nationalist image as context and subtext, he diverts attention away from this militant and often violent black nationalist iconography of cross-gendering to figure instead a strong, enduring black woman as a pacifying emblem of cross-racial American nation-building. Opting to follow the lead of other black male cross-gendering writers—most notably James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Wallace Thurman—Gaines erects Miss Jane as a she/male icon who prophesies the integrated, interracial, harmonious United States nation that emerges ironically out of black folk’s capacity to endure and transcend an entrenched history of state-endorsed racial violence and abjection. Gaines chooses a woman as his medium/subject both to envelope the image of the gigantic black feminine as black nationalist icon and to counter that image in favor of a conscientious black nation within a bloody white nation, the black (wo)man as the purifying conscience of the historically compromised American nation-state. On the one hand, Gaines’s iconography has the benefit of disturbing and subverting the normatively masculine stance of black nationalism by figuring a she/male whose cross-gendering is less aggressively patriarchal in size and intent, more ambivalently feminine in spirit and form. On the other hand, it has the effect of “softening” and thus blunting the militant agency of a defiant black collective conscience and consciousness.

Menopausal life as imitation of art: Margery Kempe and the lack of sorority

Margery Kempe may have well been one of the first women on record who we can read about who entered menopause; however, by the time Margery had entered that stage of life, she had probably ostracized herself from any female support system or sorority. Her self-exile from any sisterhood seems to have been motivated by her desire to participate in a world where only men were empowered: first she tried various unsuccessful business ventures and then later turned to religion. Reinventing herself by imitating female spiritual icons, Margery escaped the imprisoning drudgery she saw as the life of a medieval matron and thrust herself into the influential circle of the male episcopate

The Effects Of Media Exposure On Anxiety, Depression, And Global Mood States

Previous experimental research has documented that exposure to idealized female models adversely affects women's mood and body image (Stice, 2001). The ultra-thin icon has figured prominently in this research but is not the only image promoted in popular women's magazines. The lean muscular body or hyper-fit physique is also widely represented and research to date has not examined the relationship between media exposure with the fit female icon as opposed to the ultra-thin model. PURPOSE This investigation had several purposes. The primary purpose was to quantify the effects of fitness media exposure on psychological affect. A secondary purpose was to tease out expectancy effects utilization of the Solomon 4 group design. A finalpurpose was to extend this research and measure psychological affect of men while viewing ultra-fit images of males in popular media. METHODS Male and Female volunteers were counterbalanced and randomly assigned to either a fitness or control (no idealized images of males or females present) magazine condition. All participants viewed magazines for 30-minutes. The dependant variables of state and trait anxiety (STAI), tension, depression, anger vigor, fatigue, confusion, and global mood (POMS) were measured with a Solomon 4-group design. Data was analyzed with a series of dependent t-tests and a repeated measure ANOVA on post-test scores comparing with pre-testing conditions. This allowed for speculation regarding pre-test sensitization and expectancy. RESULTS Results indicate that pre-test sensitization was not a significant factor when testing the psychological factors in this investigation. Additionally, the outcomes associated with viewing ultra-fit images in popular media are variable. Significant effects were realized with anxiety, depression and total mood in both genders. CONCLUSION It is concluded that viewing idealized images in the media is not a benign experience and should be further examined.